Among the most intriguing photographs of life at the Bauhaus is a double exposure that juxtaposes the face of a confident young woman staring past the camera, as if towards her dynamic future, against glimpses of the white walls and metal balconies of the modernist building designed for the school by its founder, Walter Gropius, in the German city of Dessau.
The image was made by a Hungarian photography student, Judit Kárász, in 1931. The subject is her friend Otti Berger, one of the school’s most gifted students and a teacher who led its experiments in modernising textile design and production by developing new dyes, finishes, yarns, and weaving techniques.
At the time, Kárász’s double exposure must have seemed like an optimistic vision of the Bauhaus’s role in forging a progressive future. But the Bauhaus Dessau was closed by the Nazi Party the following year. Berger, who was Jewish, opened a studio in Berlin before fleeing to London in 1936 to avoid Nazi persecution. Having failed to secure a visa to join her Bauhaus colleagues in the U.S., she returned to her family home only to be arrested, sent to Auschwitz, and murdered. Knowing this, it becomes impossible to interpret Kárász’s image as anything other than funereal.
Her haunting portrait of Berger and the Bauhaus Dessau is one of thousands of photographs taken by Kárász in an impressive and often courageous career, which, until recently, risked being forgotten. Born in the Hungarian city of Szeged in 1912, Kárász became fascinated by photography in her teens. She studied the medium in Paris for six months in 1930 before enrolling at the Bauhaus, where her teacher, the German photographer and visual theorist Walter Peterhans, encouraged his students to use photography to document contemporary life. He also urged them to experiment with extreme close-ups, complex angles, and double exposures, as Kárász did in her portrait of Berger.
Like Berger, Kárász was Jewish and lived in dread of Nazism. After leaving the Bauhaus in 1932, she settled in Berlin, determined to continue her experiments by using her camera to chart poverty and injustice. She worked for Dephot, an agency that represented Robert Capa and other documentary photographers, while traveling across Germany to photograph new roads, bridges, and other infrastructure. She also spent time with her family in Hungary, where she photographed the impact of the extreme poverty in rural areas.
Gradually, Kárász established a reputation as a perceptive and original documentary photographer, but by 1935, she was so alarmed by the increasingly brutal and oppressive Nazi regime that she left Germany for Denmark. She secured Danish citizenship through a marriage of convenience to the artist Hans Helving while living with her lover, the German writer Hans Henny Jahnn, on the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea. She only published one series of photographs during World War II—of daily life on Bornholm—and used the name Jahnn, to avoid being identified as Jewish. When the war ended in 1945, Kárász moved to Copenhagen, where she trained in hand weaving.
Four years later, she returned to Hungary, hoping to contribute to its reinvention as a communist state within the Soviet Union. From 1950 until her retirement in 1968, she was employed by the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest to photograph its collection. Kárász died in 1977, but her early work in documentary photography was largely ignored until 1994 when the Bornholm Art Museum staged an exhibition, prompting Tate in London and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to add some of her 1930s images to their collections.
The chief catalyst, however, for renewed interest in Kárász and her work was the rediscovery of Otti Berger’s brief but brilliant career in textile design as part of the research marking the 2019 centenary of the Bauhaus’s opening. Kárász’s ghostly double exposure swiftly became a defining image not only of Berger, but of the new focus on a more eclectic and subversive history of what is still the world’s most famous design school.
Alice Rawsthorn is a London-based writer on design. Her books include Hello World: Where Design Meets Life published by Hamish Hamilton, Design as an Attitude published by JRP|Ringier, and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future, co-written with Paola Antonelli and published by Phaidon. She and Antonelli are co-founders of the Design Emergency podcast.
